while his critical faculty was checked by them; what his implacable analysis destroyed his religious temperament reconstructed. He believed in perception, liberty, and the reality of the external world, and in a first cause; he transformed grammar by his psychological analysis, and by his positivism civil law and the law of nations. His excessive critical faculty sometimes ran to super-fine abstraction, to an intellectual algebra. Bello passed from ideology to positivism, from Destutt de Tracy to Stuart; Mill, by way of the Scottish philosophers. His admirable grammatical and juridical efforts may be attributed to his mastery of English analysis and realism. After Bello, the most remarkable of South American philosophers was Eugenio de Hostos, who was born in 1839. He did not merely expound European ideas; he had his own system, which he developed in a series of remarkable works; he was a moralist rather than a metaphysician, and whether in San Domingo or Lima or Santiago he never ceased his endeavours to reform education and the law. Problems, social and moral, gave him no rest; he sought to found a new morality and sociology. Hostos might be called an optimistic rationalist. He believed in an ideal world. Science, according {273} to him, is an efficacious agent of virtue. He thought it possible to discipline the will by teaching what is true. Good is not a metaphysical entity nor duty an imperative; the two together constitute a "natural order." A profound harmony exists between man and the world he lives in, and the moral law is merely the revelation in the consciousness of the geometry of things. For Hostos the world was just, logical, and full of reason; an internal law, _lex insita_, was manifested in the sidereal harmonies as in virtuous actions. The moral ideal is therefore merely the adaptation of conduct to the inevitable and harmonious relations of things. Does not this optimism recall the morality of Spencer, the rigorous ethics of Spinoza, and the thought of Cournot, that "the philosophical basis of morality is the idea of conformity to the universal order"? The founders of the Republic were formed by scholasticism. In the old universities men debated in language bristling with syllogisms. A free philosophic doctrine which accepted all the Catholic verities--immortality, free will, and Providence--and explained them with a fiery eloquence, was the reaction against this school, whose thought was crystallised in variable forms; this philosophy corresponded to the romanticism of the politicians, to their faith in democracy, liberty, and human progress.